In some types of data monitoring systems including a large number of nodes for data collection, the data collection generally occurs according to a tree-type structure of data collection processes that defines the flow of data from one node to the other. For example, in a business service model, a parent data collection node can include data collection processes having numeric incoming status rules that define which data needs to be collected from the other nodes connected to the data collection node and how to aggregate the numeric results from multiple nodes. Typically, these aggregate results are needed, but by several data collection nodes higher in the tree-type structure. Accordingly, any change in the operation of a data collection process in one data collection node can potentially affect the operation of a large number of data collection processes in other data collection nodes.